Aims and scope

Grid environments enable collaborations involving large
numbers of people and large scale resources, and promote the emergence of a new
paradigm for scientific research: e-Science. Different layers of middleware,
e.g., for managing Grid resources, computing tasks, data, and information, form
the basic framework for realising an e-Science environment. By automating the management
of experiment routines, a scientific workflow management system hides the
underlying integration details of the e-Science resources and allows a
scientist to focus on the high level domain specific aspects of the
experiments. The support for scientific workflows is being recognised as a
crucial feature for introducing an e-Science environment to application
scientists from different domains.

The WSES workshop focuses on practical aspects of scientific workflow management
systems: design, implementation, applications in all fields of computational
science, interoperability among workflows and the e-Science infrastructure,
e.g., knowledge framework, for workflow management.The workshop aims to provide a forum for
researchers and developers in the field of e-Science to exchange the latest
experience and research ideas on scientific workflow management and e-Science.

Live demos of workflow
systems and workflow application are welcome.

Topics

Authors are invited to submit original
manuscripts that demonstrate current research in all areas of scientific
workflow management in e-Science. The workshop solicits novel papers on a broad
range of topics, including but not limited to:

Paper submission and publication

Authors should submit electronically a full (8-page) paper in PDF format
to (zhiming@science.uva.nl). The
papers will be carefully evaluated based on originality, significance,
technical soundness, and clarity of expression. Accepted papers should be
presented at the workshop. All accepted papers will be published in the
conference proceedings in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)
series by Springer-Verlag. Selected best papers, after extension, will be
published in a suitable international journal as a special issue.

Important Dates

December
2 December 17, 2005 Full paper due

January 31,
2006 Notification

February
10, 2006 Camera-ready paper due

Programme committee

Marian Bubak
(AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland).

Program

Workshop report

The first international workshop on
Workflow Systems in e-Science (WSES 2006) was successfully held in the context
of International Conference of Computational Science 2006 in Reading University
in May 29 2006. WSES aimed to provide
a forum for researchers and developers in the field of e-Science to exchange
the latest experience and research ideas on scientific workflow management and
e-Science. WSES focused on practical aspects of scientific workflow management
systems: design, implementation, applications in all fields of computational
science, interoperability among workflows and the e-Science infrastructure,
e.g., knowledge framework, for workflow management.

The workshop was organized by
Zhiming Zhao and Adam Belloum from University of Amsterdam. The workshop
attracted 29 submissions. Each paper was reviewed by at least three referees,
and 17 papers, including 9 regular ones and 8 short ones, were accepted. The
presentations were organized as three sessions: scientific workflows
applications, system architecture and middleware, and development issues. One
discussion session was organized at the end of the workshop. Zhao, Belloum and
Altintas chaired these sessions respectively. Three speakers were absent and
more than 20 researchers attended the workshop.

The
first session, chaired by Zhao, had six papers:

Altintas presented the first two papers;
she discussed how Kepler was used in integrating GIS packages for geospatial
modelling, and in coupling distributed computing processes and a GEON portal.
She demonstrated the flexibility of using Kepler in wrapping command line based
software resources and in controlling backend computing processes.

Paventhan presented the third paper; he
discussed the development and implementation of a wind tunnel grid system
workflow using .NET-based CoG Toolkit and Globus grid services.

Afterwards, three short papers were
presented. Navas-Delgado presented how reusable services in a workflow system
were used to facilitate the rapid prototyping of scientific experiments,
Czekierda discussed workflow issues in a distributed scientific experiment
management environment called Virtual Laboratory, and Kaczmarek discussed work
on integrating compute-intensive tasks into scientific workflow in
BessyCluster.

The
second session, chaired by Belloum, had five papers:

The presenter of the first paper was
absent.

The second and third papers reported
research conducted in the project of ICENI II. Colling discussed how the high
level services ICENI II environment added on-top of existing Grid architectures
for supporting workflows involves different experiment instruments. McGough
focused on the workflow deployment issues between different levels of
abstraction in ICENI II.

Harrson presented a regular paper on
handling data in scientific workflows using a light weight service called Styx.

Lee presented a short paper on using agent
technology in developing workflow middleware and in coordinating workflows and
a Grid portal.

The
third session, chaired by Altinas, had three papers:

The first paper was presented by Hluchy; he
discussed tools developed in the project of K-WfGrid for supporting semantic
level workflow composition. Zuo and Merelli presented two short papers on
optimising Grid computing processes via net solver, and on enacting workflows
in an e-Science environment.

BOF
discussion session:

Since three speakers were absent, a BOF
discussion session which was originally scheduled at the second day was shifted
to the end of the first day. In the discussion session, Altinas first presented
a list of challenge issues in scientific workflow systems. Industrial standards
in scientific workflows, and different levels of user support in workflows were
extensively discussed. Thanks Altinas for making notes.

After the workshop, a special issue for the
workshop is being proposed. The CFP for the special issue will come soon.

CFP of the special issue:
SPECIAL ISSUE FOR WORKS06 and WSES2006

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Scientific
Programming journal announces a forthcoming special issue for the Workshop on
Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science 2006 and the 1st International
Workshop on workflow systems in e-Science to be published in December 2006.

Scientific Programming provides a meeting ground for research results in, and practical experience with, software engineering environments, tools, languages, and models of computation aimed specifically at supporting scientific and engineering computing. Scientific Programming brings together in one place developments that are found in a wide variety of journals, conference proceedings and informal society journals. Scientific Programming publishes papers on language, compiler and programming environment issues for scientific computing. Of particular interest are contributions to programming and software engineering for grid computing, high performance computing, processing very large data sets, supercomputing, visualization and parallel computing.

As the author of papers submitted to WORKS06 and WSES 2006, you are invited to submit your UPDATED version of the paper on the both workshop proceedings to the Scientific Computing journal, if your paper is within one of the aspects of workflow systems and e-Science, but not limited to:

Author guideline

a.Authors should follow the Scientific Programming manuscript format. An
electronic copy of the manuscript, in Postscript or PDF format should be
submitted via electronic mail to all these three emails: (deelman@isi.edu, zhiming@science.uva.nl, adam@science.uva.nl) by August 15th, 2006. Submission should include authors names, affiliations, addresses,
phone numbers and e-mail addresses on the cover page. Only original
manuscripts, which have not been submitted elsewhere, will be considered for
publication. All papers will be subject to a thorough peer review process.

b.Submitted paper must be an updated version (at least 20% difference) of the one submitted to WORKS06 and WSES 2006. An update report, 5 KEYWORDS, together with the manuscript should be sent to all guest editors:

c.It is recommended that the paper does not exceed 12 printedpages. PDF files are preferred. Word files are acceptable, but Latex sources are required for the final version.

d.There is no the publishing fee. All authors will get a free PDF file of your paper, and then the authors can order the offprints.